When we were talking about weather systems, and in particular, storms, I started to looking around for some ideas to make the topic more fun. I came across this gorgeous blog and took my inspiration from this post – Storm in a Jar
We also used this website to get some more information, it was fantastic – Thunderstorms
This was a nice simple experiment as I had all the items we needed to hand. We used the following items:
- Glass Jars
- Shaving Foam
- Water
- Plastic Pipettes
- Fluorescent Paint
- Glow in the Dark Paint
- Little mixing bowls
- Stirring Sticks
- UV Torch
So first of all we took five small mixing bowls and squirted a little fluorescent paint in each, we chose pink, orange, yellow, green and blue. We then added a little squirt of glow in the dark paint into each bowl and then a splash of water to make the paint thin. We took one stirring stick per colour and mixed up the paint in each bowl.
Next we filled our jars, about two thirds of the way up, with water, then added some shaving foam to the top to create our ‘cloud’.
As we were talking about what causes the rain, we started to use the pipettes to add paint to the shaving foam cloud. We made sure that the pipette stayed in the ‘cloud’ and not directly into the water so that it would start to get heavy with droplets.
After a while the ‘clouds’ started to ‘rain’ and the effects were absolutely amazing. We turned on our UV torch and lit those storms up. The kids spent ages on this activity and I have to admit that my husband and I really enjoyed it too.
